HP, Vidyo Team Up on Video Conferencing

Hewlett-Packard is partnering with video conferencing software maker Vidyo to expand the collaboration capabilities of its Halo telepresence products. HP will begin offering desktops and other devices integrated with Vidyo's VidyoConferencing software.

Hewlett-Packard is looking to drive down the cost and expand the customer
base of its Halo telepresence products through a partnership with Vidyo.
Through the partnership, which was announced June 9, HP will
integrate Vidyo's VidyoConferencing software into HP PCs and other products to
offer high-definition desktop video conferencing over enterprise networks.

Included in the offerings will be an executive desktop package
that runs on an HP TouchSmart PC. The products, which will begin appearing
later in 2010, will be HP-branded, though they will be jointly marketed.

The HP-Vidyo partnership announcement comes amid a host of
other video conferencing and telepresence news from the InfoComm show, in Las
Vegas. Cisco System officials announced June 8 that
Cisco will be putting
its Telepresence Interoperability Protocol into Tandberg telepresence
products, and is rolling out TelePresence Commercial Express, a low-cost
immersive video collaboration offering for small and midsize businesses.
Polycom officials on June 7 rolled
out the OTX 300 telepresence offering, which is designed to drive down the
bandwidth needed and costs of telepresence sessions. For its part, Vidyo at the
show announced free multipoint conferencing for room systems.
For HP, the partnership with Vidyo will enable it to offer
video conferencing within its Halo portfolio at a much lower cost. Like Cisco's
TelePresence offerings, HP's Halo telepresence products require businesses to
buy life-sized monitors, which can run more than $100,000, and dedicated
Internet hookups that can cost $10,000 or more per month.
These immersive video collaboration offerings can also include
furniture and other amenities. The idea is to create an environment in which
people in the video conference feel they are in the same room, even though they
may be half a world away.
The telepresence offerings also include other collaboration
tools, such as for document sharing and editing.
With Vidyo's video conferencing software, HP can now bring its
capabilities to the desktop and to mobile devices, which in turn will help
drive down costs for businesses and increase HP's customer base.
"This is important because enterprise customers continue
to demand high-quality, low-cost solutions for the desktop that are fully
interoperable with traditional video conferencing endpoints as well as HP
Halo," Darren Podrabsky, marketing manager for HP's Halo business, said in
an e-mail to eWEEK. "This agreement between Vidyo and HP now brings a
high-quality video experience to desktops and conference rooms while operating
on infrastructure that delivers a lower total cost of ownership."
Vidyo's products run on H.264 Scalable Video Coding, which
reduces latency and removes the need for a costly multipoint control unit,
which will give HP's offerings highly reliable video capabilities.
"HP is the leader in desktop computing systems and,
together with Vidyo's disruptive H.264 SVC
VidyoConferencing solutions, HP is now the de facto leader in desktop video conferencing,"
Vidyo CEO Ofer Shapiro said in an e-mail to
eWEEK.
Adoption of video conferencing tools is growing as businesses
look to increase productivity while reducing costs, including travel expenses.
They also see the technology as a way of increasing collaboration with partners
and customers.
Cisco has been selling its TelePresence products for about five
years, and company officials have said they expect the global telepresence
market to grow from $3 billion in 2010 to about $10 billion in the next five to
seven years.